I've been into surrealism since I was very young. More accurately, I found it terrifying and then became addicted to it. Reading through my mother's mail-order Famous Artists volumes from the sixties, I became familiar with all the male greats and came away knowing exactly zero women in the movement. A couple years ago, I got it in my head to learn more about the women I knew were there but history had largely edited out (or relegated to the role of muse or mistress). At some point in my research, I realized that not only were these women fierce innovators in their mediums, but they also frequently had disarming personal presentation. On a lark I put a self-portrait next to some of their portraits and something just felt... right (see bonus items).

As a "necessity is the mother of invention" sort of exercise, and to break myself out of my normal sonic palette, I decided to eschew my usual music-making tools and use very limited means to improvise sound experiments while looking at works by some of these artists.

Some tools I used:
-Arturia Microbrute analog synth
-Beads rolling around in a wooden bowl
-Implements such as a personal massager and the base of a wine glass applied to the strings of an electric guitar hooked up to a RAT pedal
-A wooden spoon on a washing machine

Some parts conceived of through improvisation were redone to make them usable, but quite a few components here are first-take. Each track is titled pretty much the same thing as the artwork I associated with it. A video of the works with their companion tracks can be viewed here (I very much recommend checking it out for the full experience): youtu.be/qkynR7UKSYc?si=pgqrib3kypCvsE-J

The EP's title is a reference to 1) how surrealism infuses ordinary things with threatening potential energy, and 2) how women in the surrealist movement were objectified/viewed as ornamental, all the while performing ingenious, imaginative feats of creation themselves.